NATO Arrests Bosnian Serb War Crimes Suspect

Published: April 23, 2000

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 22—
A Bosnian Serb who was the first suspect indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been arrested, NATO said today.

The suspect, Dragan Nikolic, was apprehended on Friday in the American sector of Serb-controlled northern Bosnia and taken to a detention center in The Hague today, a NATO statement said.

Mr. Nikolic, former commander of the Susica prison camp for Bosnian Muslims near Vlasenica, was indicted in November 1994.

He is accused of raping four women, clubbing two inmates to death and torturing and beating four more, and of having command responsibility for many other abuses at the camp, where an estimated 8,000 Muslims and other non-Serbs were detained between May and October 1992. Guards raped and beat prisoners on a daily basis, killing an unspecified number of them, according to the indictment.

Mr. Nikolic is the latest in a series of high-profile suspects arrested by NATO forces after years of complaints that peacekeepers were not aggressively pursuing them. Momcilo Krajisnik, an close ally of the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, was arrested on April 3 in eastern Bosnia.

Mr. Krajisnik, the top Bosnian Serb arrested so far, has been charged with every war crime on the Yugoslav tribunal's statute. Mr. Krajisnik is alleged to have been a principal strategist, along with Mr. Karadzic, behind civilian massacres aimed at carving an ethnically pure Serb state out of Bosnian territory.

Mr. Karadzic is believed to be in Bosnia. His military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic, lives in Belgrade under the protection of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, who has himself been indicted for atrocities committed during last year's crackdown in Kosovo.